“I can absolutely guarantee that’s why he brought Marissa,” she says.
The suggestion stings a little, mostly because she’s probably right.
Nick tries to work this out. “You mean, he doesn’t want to bond?”
I hum, unsure that this is the right interpretation. “More like he doesn’t know how. Marissa is a good buffer.”
Nick rolls to his back, staring up at the sky. “So you didn’t know him at all growing up?”
“I lived with both parents until I was eight,” I tell him. “Then I didn’t see him again until I was eighteen.”
“That’s when the story broke,” Nick says, nodding.
I glance over at Charlie, who meets my eyes at the same time. Nick is getting dangerously close to where Sam comes onto the scene.
“Yeah, it was time,” I tell him, going for breezy. “I was ready to start working, and so a ghost publicist dropped the scoop to the Guardian.”
Even Dad would back up this story, because he still thinks it’s true: that I wanted to reconnect with my father and was ready to begin an acting career, so Mom and Nana hired someone to break the story. In fact, Dad was initially furious with Mom for not letting his team in on the plan.
“For real, though? That’s a pretty sophisticated publicity feat for an eighteen-year-old . . .” Nick says, skeptical now. I wonder what information he has, and how he’s been turning it over in his mind since we got here.
“For real.” Charlie moves to her stomach, adjusting the towel under her. “You realize Tate is telling you things she could sell to People for like a hundred grand. You better be trustworthy.”
“What,” Nick says, grinning, “you want some quid pro quo? I could talk about Rhianna. Or my night with Selena Gomez.”
“No, it’s okay,” I tell him, laughing as Charlie says, “Hell yes, give me all the dirt.”
He confides a little, telling us bits of things I knew, and bits I definitely did not. I’m not sure if he’s this open with everyone, or it’s the obvious comfort I have with Charlie and Trey that makes Nick feel like he’s among family, but he gives us a genuine glimpse of who he is: an actor like me, who wants connection, yet has a hard time knowing how to do that in the bright light of the world’s stage. It’s clear neither of us would be very good at a fling on set, no matter how much he wants his reputation to make me think he could pull it off.
Nick looks up, and points across the water to where Gwen walks along the lake edge with Sam and Liz, the three of them deep in conversation. I’m guessing they’re done shooting for the day, and the sun is already sagging in the sky, threatening to duck below the tree line and pull the cold air over us like a blanket.
I stand, just as Nick teases, “I’m gonna find out what happened with you and the writer.”
“Why do you think it’s at all interesting?” I ask, keeping my tone playful. “I told you we were just kids.”
“Nah. I’m going to be here with you for, what? Two months?” he says. “I want to get in that head of yours. And that story feels like a real glimpse at you. You’re an enigma, you have to know that.”
Charlie and Trey go still, as if they’re working to be invisible during this conversation.
“I’m an enigma?”
“Beautiful,” he says, “but sort of unknowable.”
Huh. That’s exactly how I’d describe my father.
seventeen
EVERYONE GATHERS IN THE Community House for dinner together; tonight it’s a rustic spread of roasted chicken, root vegetables grown on the farm, salad, bread, and for dessert, apple pie. I sit at a table with Dad and Marissa, Nick, Gwen, Liz, and Deb. It’s fun, and definitely good to bond with all of them together, but I find myself glancing in yearning every now and then at the raucous table just beside us with Devon, the teenage versions of Ellen and Richard, some of the livelier members of the crew . . . and Sam.
Despite what my head tells me, my eyes have missed the sight of him. It’s so crazy how we age but don’t completely change; how I can still see the twenty-one-year-old in him. I’ve imagined him so many times in the first few years after London, tried to remember exactly what he looked like, the way he sounded. And then I worked to forget him entirely, and mostly succeeded. It’s hard to believe I’m not staring at a mirage.
My attention is jerked back to our table when I realize Dad is telling a story about me. “. . . she ran off the deck and jumped right into the river. I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
Everyone laughs knowingly—kids, am I right?—but I scrabble through my thoughts to place the story he’s telling. The only time I remember running and jumping off a deck into the river is up in Guerneville, where Dad has literally never been.
“Apparently she and Charlie did it all the time,” he says, shaking his head. “They’d just never done it before during any of my visits.” Dad meets my eyes and winks. My fingers tingle cold. “She probably knew I’d go insane if I saw that. Such a cute little river kid.”
He’s full-on telling a story about something that never happened. It’s not unexpected that we’d have to share some fabricated father-daughter time—we’ve had to do it once or twice for magazine interviews—but I’m aware of Nick watching me closely, remembering what I said earlier. And as complicated as my feelings are about Dad, I don’t want him to be exposed publicly as a liar. I’m aware of everyone else watching me, waiting for me to chime in with my side of the story.
I smile over my wineglass at him. “No one ever got hurt,” I say.
“As far as I know,” Dad teases, eyes light. Our eyes lock, and his are so full of glimmering adoration, it seems he believes the lie as much as everyone else does.
“So—wait,” Gwen says, “you’re talking about Charlie, from hair and makeup?” She looks at me. “Did I hear right that you’ve been friends for years?”
“Since elementary school, yeah,” I say. “She’s a trip.”
“Oh, Charlie,” Dad says, laughing. “Now she was a handful.” He leans back in his chair and regales everyone with stories about some fictional version of my best friend, daredevilish in ways that feel true to Charlie’s spirit but are completely fabricated. Skiing down hills on cardboard skis, climbing water towers our town didn’t even have. I look around—my eyes flitting past Sam’s broad form only a few feet away—and find her at a table with Trey and a few of the grips. I make a mental note to tell her about all the trouble she got up to as a kid later. Dad didn’t actually meet her until she was well into her twenties.
I risk a glance at Sam as I turn back around, and he’s looking directly at me, smiling at something Devon has just said, but his eyes are distant, like he’s really only straining to hear what is happening at my table. He blinks away when our eyes meet, down to his plate, and spears a piece of chicken.
I tune back into Dad, talking now about what it was like to volunteer in my classroom and try to pretend like he wasn’t Ian Butler. My God. I feel half of Nick’s attention on me, half on my father, as if he’s trying to put together what version of the story to believe. Does he see me as the bitter child of a Hollywood legend, trying to make him look like a deadbeat dad? Or does he see through Ian’s lies and my bright smile to the facade we’re trying to maintain?
“Okay, Dad,” I say finally, laughing lightly. “Enough embarrassing the kid.”
He grins, and stretches his arm across the back of Marissa’s chair. “You know you love it.”
No words. I have no words.
Liz shakes her head at us. “You two are so cute.”
“She’s a chip off the old block,” he says.
“No one says that anymore.”
After a long beat of silence, his head falls back and he lets out a booming laugh. The pressure is released from the moment, and everyone else finally laughs too.
The wine flows, and even Gwen starts to loosen up, telling us stories from other sets: disasters, successes, urban legends that turn out to have been true. For a short while she even keeps Dad quiet and riveted. But then it’s his turn again and he dials up the charm. I’m faintly aware of the tables around us going quiet to listen to him, and my pulse picks up, worried about what he’ll say, and constantly aware of Sam so nearby, hearing everything.
With a few glasses of wine in my blood, I can no longer keep such a stranglehold on my thoughts, and the itch is back, tickling my brain, making me want to know whether Sam thought of me. Whether he saw my life taking off and ever regretted shoving me away the way he did. Were his feelings at all real? Or was it always a play to get money, from that very first night?
I tune back in to Dad, seeing directly through his veneer of self-deprecation, of humility. He’s telling one of his favorites, and at least this time it’s true: the first time he visited me on the Evil Darlings set, and all the ways I had the entire cast and crew wrapped around my finger. The subtext is always clear: my daughter has the magic touch—she got it from me.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Sam stand, check his phone, and then ask Devon something that makes him point over in the direction of the stairs, to the same office I had used to call Mom earlier. He straightens and crosses the room like a ship cutting through water.
He’s going to make a phone call.
Before I really think it through, curiosity propels my legs back so I’m standing, pretending I have to use the restroom, following Sam across the room.
I’m not even sure what I’m expecting to happen, what information I think I’m going to glean from this. But I need to know where he’s been all these years, who he calls after dinner.
Once he’s out of the dining hall and past the entryway, he climbs the stairs two at a time. He’s so long; maybe he’s in a hurry, maybe it’s just his stride. It means I have to fall back, hang in the shadows. My hands are sweating. My head is telling me to go finish dinner and stop playing Nancy Drew.